Nurturing Ideas Into Open Source Projects?

lkehresman asks: "Over the course of the past few years, I have been involved in numerous open source projects and have been discovering the wonderful oddities with this development model. However, I am perplexed as to how one would go about starting a project with the bazaar model, and if it's even possible. Indeed, ESR states, "One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in the bazaar mode." Is this true? Can anyone give any personal testimony to projects that have succeeded being built like this from the ground up?"

"Until recently, I was the leader of the SquirrelMail project. When it started, we released version 0.1 and people started hacking on it. However, when we decided to do a rewrite, we attempted to start over using the bazaar model from the ground up, allowing for group discussions and decisions. We got caught in a years worth of discussion before any code was actually developed (now, however, its development is well under way and flourishing). I've seen this through personal experiece with countless other projects as well.

As I am venturing into this territory once again with a new project, I'm wondering if anyone in the community has had personal experience with this, and can lend advice as to how to avoid endless bickering about trivial issues. Having a code base to release is obviously a key factor, but in this case, that simply isn't possible due to the magnitude of the task at hand. Advice?"

Comments

Data Point

[FFFish]

Example of open-source idea that hasn't taken off: the endless work that has been done to create an workflow/information management system.

There have been at least a half-dozen attempts to plan such a system, but AFAIK none have made it to the point of being well-documented, let alone well-coded.

This is a shame, because its one of those "killer apps" that could rocket Linux into mainstream business use.

Re:Data Point

[JohnMunsch]

It can take a lot of forms but I can give an example taken from my personal experience.

GameDev.net is run by a diverse group of people spread all over the U.S. A workflow system would allow us to take incoming emails for example or new news or article submissions and perform a sequence of tasks on them.

For example, all new email items could be directed to one individual who screens the email. The items that made it through the initial screening could go to whomever was designated as "email answerer" for that week. The resulting replies could be sent to another individual for approval and then the reply sent.

Incoming articles could send out a copy of the article to each person on a review committee. They could approve or decline approval but if a sufficient number approved the item it would be automatically posted to the site.

There are lots of examples of this but it basically has to do with data movement and editing among a variety of humans and automated processes. The movement is normally defined externally in some kind of program or script so individuals don't have to know what happens when they get a new email and hit the approve or disapprove button. They just do their job and the system moves the data to the next person or directly to its final destination without their having to be informed of every change in procedure.

Not entirely correct! Check out Sourceforge...

[SuperKendall]

I was recently looking around for something like this, and as I remember the most interesting looking project I found was the Open For Business project. They are definatley further along than just design and have at least some code (some parts of the project further along than others). Actually Workflow is but one part of the project, they have a whole range of related things.

The project is based on J2EE standards as well as standards proposed by OMG (Object Managemnet Group). The workflow piece in particular is based on stuff from WfMC.

So, have a look through that. A simple search on "Workflow" revealed many other projects on Sourceforge, otheres look like they might have a great deal of substance as well.